Thomas Coulter

Thomas Coulter (1793-1843) was an Irish physician, botanist and explorer. He is known for his extensive collection of plants collected in Mexico and California and for being the first curator of the Trinity College herbarium in Dublin. Pinus coulteri, a large conifer pine species native to California, and Romneya coulteri, the Matilija poppy, are named after him.

Education and Mexican years

He was born in 1793, near Dundalk, in County Louth, Ireland. After completing his medical studies in Dublin, he went to Europe to study botany; He worked for seventeen months under the Swiss plant classifier Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in Geneva, and spent some time in Paris. He went to Mexico in 1824 and worked as a physician for the Real del Monte Company, which operated silver mines in the Hidalgo region. He continued to collect plants during his stay in Mexico.

california discoveries

He reached Monterey by sea in November 1831 and made it the center of his work. In the same year, he collected the pine species that is named after him today. In 1832 he crossed the desert in southern California as far as the Colorado River; He is considered the first botanist to cross the Colorado Desert.

He returned to Ireland in 1834. The specimens he brought from Mexico and California formed the core of the Trinity College herbarium; Coulter became the first curator of this herbarium and joined the faculty of the college. He was a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He died in Dublin on 28 November 1843.

His colleague William Henry Harvey, who introduced his collection to European and American botanists, named the genus Romneya after Coulter's friend, astronomer Thomas Romney Robinson, and the species after Coulter. Recent examinations of samples stored at Trinity College have revealed the first samples of moss and marine algae collected from California, as well as previously unrecognized type specimens. The author abbreviation in plant names is "Coult." It is used as.